An artfully crafted story about the connection between a boy and his dog and the deep bond between a son and his mother.
A disfigured rescue dog changes the lives of a single mother and her chronically ill son in this inspiring story.
Eleven-year-old Jasper Blunt volunteers at the animal shelter where his mother, Kate, works as a veterinarian. Jasper has cystic fibrosis, and he endures frequent hospital stays as well as marginalized social status at school. One day, Jasper shows up at the shelter as multiple workers wrestle a badly scarred dog who has just arrived. To everyone’s surprise, the dog calms instantly when Jasper appears. Jasper declares that the animal’s name is Whistler, and when Kate asks how he knows, Jasper responds, “Because he told me.” As Jasper insists that he can communicate wordlessly with this dog, Kate grows concerned that her son might be suffering from psychosis in addition to CF. Yet, as Jasper spends more time with Whistler, his health, social skills, and outlook on life all improve. Unfortunately, if Whistler is not adopted within two weeks of arrival, shelter policy mandates he be put down. Kate continually rejects Jasper’s pleas to keep the dog, primarily because their housing development forbids pets. Kate finally receives a call from a man who claims he’s been searching for Whistler for years. As Kate and Jasper journey from Massachusetts to New Mexico to bring Whistler home, both Jasper and his mother wonder if they can ever return to a life that doesn’t include this special animal. This animal-centric narrative gets off to a slow start, but it gradually rises to an exciting crescendo. The author builds suspense by doling out revelations about Whistler’s past and posing questions as to how this information should affect the dog’s future. Told alternately from the perspectives of Kate and Jasper, the story tugs at the heartstrings by exploring the effects of chronic disease on both the afflicted and their caregivers, touching especially on issues of guilt, grief, and depression. Readers must be willing to suspend a certain amount of disbelief as they get to know Whistler, but the ensuing ride through this engaging tale will be worth the effort.
An artfully crafted story about the connection between a boy and his dog and the deep bond between a son and his mother.Pub Date: April 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-274794-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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